Hey yall, does there exist some platform that allows you to post a donation matching campaign?
I would match all donations my friends/families make to a charity. I want the platform to ensure verification that I am actually matching the donations of my friends and vis versa.
Does anything like this exist? And if not, would you be interested in using one? I am thinking of making such a platform.
You could create a charity fundraiser on GoFundMe or Every.org and match the donations yourself.
If you want to automate the donation matching, I’d suggest batching the donations and only charging the fundraiser creator for the total amount every 14 days or when the fundraiser ends, rather than creating a matching transaction for every donation. That would cut down on payment processing fees.
You could also experiment with authorization holds on the user’s credit card—they basically hold a certain amount of money hostage on the credit card to make sure that amount (or some lesser amount) can be charged to the card later. For example, you could authorize $200, and if the fundraiser only raises $150 by the time the hold expires, charge only $150 to the card.
There are some risks to the user that you might want to design around:
If the fundraiser raises a lot of money (> $1000 for example), the creator will be liable for a huge donation match and may not be prepared to pay that all at once. You could set a cap on the amount that the creator pledges to match, or set up a “pay over time” option.
If the user sets up a bank transfer or debit card as their payment method, there’s a risk that the matching payments will result in an overdraft on their bank account. I’d be more comfortable using a credit card even though the processing fees are higher.
I’m interested in making it automated. It’s a real pain to get the proper permissioning to hold funds in escrow so my initial pass would be to just have the campaign starter fully donate their amount at the start (since most people who make matching campaigns will ultimately donate the same max amount of money) and then have an ‘unlock’ that occurs as other people donate (with integration to every.org to verify the charity etc).
However the authorization holds is an interesting idea. Good if you want to actually have it just match what other people donate! A consideration though is that authorization holds only last 7 days according to Stripe limiting the campaign time.
Platform for Social Donation Matching?
Hey yall, does there exist some platform that allows you to post a donation matching campaign?
I would match all donations my friends/families make to a charity. I want the platform to ensure verification that I am actually matching the donations of my friends and vis versa.
Does anything like this exist? And if not, would you be interested in using one? I am thinking of making such a platform.
You could create a charity fundraiser on GoFundMe or Every.org and match the donations yourself.
If you want to automate the donation matching, I’d suggest batching the donations and only charging the fundraiser creator for the total amount every 14 days or when the fundraiser ends, rather than creating a matching transaction for every donation. That would cut down on payment processing fees.
You could also experiment with authorization holds on the user’s credit card—they basically hold a certain amount of money hostage on the credit card to make sure that amount (or some lesser amount) can be charged to the card later. For example, you could authorize $200, and if the fundraiser only raises $150 by the time the hold expires, charge only $150 to the card.
There are some risks to the user that you might want to design around:
If the fundraiser raises a lot of money (> $1000 for example), the creator will be liable for a huge donation match and may not be prepared to pay that all at once. You could set a cap on the amount that the creator pledges to match, or set up a “pay over time” option.
If the user sets up a bank transfer or debit card as their payment method, there’s a risk that the matching payments will result in an overdraft on their bank account. I’d be more comfortable using a credit card even though the processing fees are higher.
Interesting! Thank you so much for replying!
I’m interested in making it automated. It’s a real pain to get the proper permissioning to hold funds in escrow so my initial pass would be to just have the campaign starter fully donate their amount at the start (since most people who make matching campaigns will ultimately donate the same max amount of money) and then have an ‘unlock’ that occurs as other people donate (with integration to every.org to verify the charity etc).
However the authorization holds is an interesting idea. Good if you want to actually have it just match what other people donate!
A consideration though is that authorization holds only last 7 days according to Stripe limiting the campaign time.